Torsten Slama draws viewers into his brave new world

In some respects, the drawings and paintings of Austrian, Berlin-based artist Torsten Slama are a throwback to German painting of nearly a century ago — specifically, the Neue Sachlichkeit or “New Objectivity” movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

But while Slama has mastered the precisely detailed rendering, uneasy mood, strange symbolism and satirical touch of such New Objectivity masters as Christian Schad, Carl Grossberg and Otto Dix, he’s also made it his own, producing science-fiction-tinged images aptly suited for our present — and future. And Toby Kamps, senior curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, has pulled off a nice coup in giving Slama his first solo museum exhibition.

As Kamps notes in his catalog essay, Slama’s predecessors were responding to “the maimed (World War I) veterans, starving prostitutes, and bloated war profiteers who thronged the streets of Berlin in the 1920s,” while Slama’s more immediate concerns involve environmental calamity. Kamps quotes Slama as saying that “an ever-expanding ecological consciousness has turned into a form of Malthusian misanthropy, where many believe the world would be better off without people.”

Slama brings such scenarios to life in works like Rubble Mine, in which a conveyer belt delivers rocks past an empty-looking building in a barren, unpopulated landscape, presumably depositing them in the viewer’s space. The mine’s admirable self-sufficiency — it seems to hum along without need of human input — is offset by the absurdity of its speciality in churning out what would be a byproduct, not the intended yield, of most mining operations. Such humorous images, of which there are plenty in this show, are in keeping with Slama’s view that every building and machine is a “cultural monument — a memorial to the civilization that built it.”

One such memorial is a refinery, ironically named for poet Walt Whitman and sited on what Slama describes as “a planet with either no atmosphere, or with a poisonous atmosphere and no ecosystem” — just behind the wreckage of a single overturned car on an otherwise empty road.

When people show up in Slama’s work, there’s usually something creepy going on, often involving a white-haired, bearded, pipe-smoking “authority figure” who in various drawings confronts, abducts or ambushes a much younger man. In one scene, the authority figure hides behind trees, aiming a club at a passing jogger. In another drawing — rightly described by Kamps as “a veritable smorgasbord of psychosexual symbolism,” the old man exhales a cloud of smoke as he confronts a youth, clad only in tight briefs and a single sock, in a hallway.

In addition to Slama’s confident, illusionistic rendering, what makes both his populated dramas and abandoned landscapes work is his knack for giving just the right amount of information — enough to lure you into his world, but not enough for you to find your way out.